You can also use do to accomplish the same thing. Here is a simple example:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;

our $config;

do '/tmp/config.pl';

print Dumper(\$config),"\n";
[download]

and /tmp/config.pl looks like:

$config = [
  option1 => 'one',
  option2 => 'two',
  option3 => 'three'
];
[download]

It might also be advantagous to setup a signal handler (or whatever means/mechanism available as a win service) that will reread the config.